Near the end of 2012, a remarkable thing happened: a conservation group and a water utility agreed on a plan to protect the upper Colorado River in Grand County.

After several years of impasse, Trout Unlimited and the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District reached agreement on how to protect the already stressed upper Colorado from Northern’s planned expansion of its Windy Gap water diversion project.

The agreement came down to this: more flows, more monitoring, and more river habitat restoration. The added conditions will help ensure that the upper Colorado River remains a gold-medal stretch of trout water.

For years, TU has said it could support two proposed water diversions from the Colorado River to the Front Range—Northern’s Windy Gap and Denver Water’s Moffat Firming project—if they contained adequate protections for the upper Colorado River system, which has been damaged by low flows, high temperatures, and choking sediment and algae. Read more…

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Apparently, Boulder police Officer Brent Curnow wasn’t too sick to drive on over to pick up the elk carcass. It also appears Curnow runs a web site that advertises “quality taxidermy at an affordable price.”

Another Boulder police officer — one who was officially working that night — is accused of having shot a large elk last week in a Boulder neighborhood known as Mapleton Hill. The officer reportedly characterized the elk’s behavior as aggressive. There also are reports he said the elk was injured.

But when asked, the Boulder Police Department first initially denied that one of its officers had shot and killed the animal. Then, the PD said the animal actually was killed by police.

Curnow and Sam Carter, the apparent trigger man in the elk shooting, are under investigation by the state’s Parks and Wildlife division and criminal charges are possible. The two also face an internal investigation from the Boulder Police Department.

In addition, Carter is said to have contacted a third law enforcement officer — from the Boulder Sheriff’s Office — by texting the deputy’s private cellphone. The purpose of the text was to ask for help in loading the dead elk. Why not use official channels to ask for help?

This incident keeps getting more curious. And given the attention the episode is getting — an elk vigil attended by 200 people and social media sites set up to commemorate the animal and the incident — the pressure is growing for answers to the many questions that remain.

Last year, the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District and Grand
County announced a “deal” on the Windy Gap Firming Project, a proposed water supply project to divert more Colorado River water from
the Western Slope in Grand County to the sprawling towns on the northern
Front Range.

If the project is ultimately permitted by the federal Bureau of
Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers, the Northern Water and Grand
County deal will provide some protections and restoration for a short
12-mile stretch of the Upper Colorado River at its headwaters in Grand
County. Those benefits are a good thing, for sure, but the deal also
carries with it a vast array of negative tradeoffs that will further
imperil all of Colorado’s rivers and lead us even farther down a path of
river destruction throughout the state.

First, the Project takes even more water out of the Upper Colorado River
— already reduced by 60 percent from its natural flows — and ships it over the
Divide to the Front Range. Even worse, some of this water will be sold
to oil and gas drillers and frackers. In fact, many of the very same
cities that are participating in the project are selling vast amounts of
water for fracking right now, the most egregious of which is Greeley. Read more…

Boulder police Officer S. Carter poses with the elk that was shot late Tuesday night at Ninth and Mapleton in Boulder. (Photo courtesy Roger Koenig)

It was pretty clear that the mysterious details of the Boulder elk killing episode were going to emerge eventually. And now that the cone of silence has begun to crack it’s apparent the Boulder Police Department has a lot of explaining to do.

What started out as an odd story has turned into something more serious.

The incident revolves around a large bull elk that apparently had been known to roam the Mapleton Hill area of Boulder for several consecutive winters. There were reports that the animal had become aggressive, and had trapped a mail carrier on a porch.

That was all prelude for what happened Tuesday night. The animal was shot dead, and residents said police killed it. However, Boulder police said they had no record of their officers having killed the animal.

On Thursday, the details began to leak out. Boulder police revealed that an officer had, in fact, killed the animal but failed to report it. The officer said the elk was injured. Then, he gave the dead elk to another officer, one who was off-duty, who took the animal to be processed for meat.

For the first time in our history, the mighty Colorado, its flows diminished by climate change and persistent drought, is no longer able to meet the human demands placed upon it. And under current trends and management practices, this situation will only get worse. Much worse.

This is the conclusion of the Colorado River Basin Study, released by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in mid-December.

The Study, which was jointly funded by the Bureau and the seven Colorado River Basin states, is a wake-up call for all of us in the Basin who rely on the bounty of the River to water our cattle and crops, our lawns and our trout fisheries and rapids runs. We need to change fundamentally the way we think about and manage the Colorado River. Read more…

The obnoxious self-righteousness of some anti-fracking activists only seems to be growing. In Boulder on Tuesday, they jeered a representative of Encana Oil and Gas and then harassed her as she walked back to her car.

Let’s have 9News reporter Todd Walker set the scene. “Wendy Wiedenbeck had asked for a security escort from the building and back to her car following testimony,” he said, “and she needed it. A group of several fracking opponents surrounded and followed her for several blocks shouting at her.”

And it’s not only energy officials they harass. Gov. John Hickenlooper had to make his way through a surly group of protesters in Longmont a few weeks ago, although they weren’t quite as nasty as the activists who followed Wiedenbeck seemed to be.

To get a sense of how over-the-top and utterly divorced from reality these activists can be – and a few appear on the verge of sounding and acting more like fascist thugs, actually – consider the words of fracking foe Jeff Thompson, as quoted in the Daily Camera.

Thompson, the Camera said, “told commissioners later during the hearing that the proposed county regulations ‘are just a big fraud, just a big farce.’

“Thompson compared Boulder County officials’ stated position — that they’ll adopt the strictest local drilling rules possible under Colorado law — to what it would have been like if Nazi Adolf Eichmann had said: ‘I did everything I could within the law to protect the Jews.'”

This isn’t just obnoxious rhetoric. It’s obscene. And the Boulder County commissioners, to their shame, permitted these clowns to disrupt and delay the start of the meeting for a full half hour.

Such results reconfirm oil and natural gas as bright spots in an otherwise dull economy. In a free market, profits signal that a firm has transformed inputs into more valuable outputs. In the aggregate, more profits than losses equals economic growth. Compare this to the losses (resource misallocation) being registered by government-subsidized energy sectors such as wind, solar, battery makers, and electric vehicles.

Yet anti-oil activists were quick to condemn the above third-quarter earnings as evidence of excess in the American oil and gas industry. This is hardly the case. The economic success of the industry boosts not only jobs but the investment of working Americans. In fact, a recent Sonecon study found that through both periods of expansion and recession, the average rate of return on investments in oil and natural gas stocks was seven times greater than the returns from other assets. Read more…

National Forest lands serve as the primary source of water that sustains cities and farmlands up and down the Front Range. This summer’s tragic wildfire season, fueled by heat and drought, once again demonstrated that catastrophic wildfires can wreak havoc on our watersheds and have devastating impact on life and property.

Fires impact water supply and water quality by increasing flows of sediment, debris and ash into streams and rivers, requiring emergency measures at treatment plants and millions of dollars to repair damage to habitat, reservoirs and facilities. Today, Colorado Springs and communities in the Fort Collins area are facing the immediate and long-term impacts from the Waldo Canyon and High Park Fires on their water supplies.

More than 10 years ago, the Buffalo Creek and Hayman fires brought to the forefront the need to work more closely together to tackle the impact of wildfires on Denver’s most critical water supply. We learned that our water infrastructure is more than pipes and dams. For Denver Water, our infrastructure encompasses more than 2 million acres of forested land in eight counties. Our investment in these watersheds is a long-term commitment to keeping them healthy decades from now.

Predators of prairie dogs, such as this Swainson’s hawk, can find perches to hunt from on new “raptor poles.” (Lyn Alweis, Denver Post file)

The city of Denver is taking the right approach by installing perches near bothersome prairie dog colonies to encourage birds of prey to do their thing.

Nature can be harsh, but it’s still preferable to gassing the animals or relocating them.

As a Post story recently explained, prairie dogs can destroy grass habitat necessary to support other wild animals. The raptor poles near Central Park in Stapleton encourage hawks — red-tailed, Swainson’s and ferruginous — as well as other birds of prey to come around for meal time.

Such a tactic encourages natural control of prairie dog populations, and increases the food supply for hawks. A double win.

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

Guidelines: The Post welcomes letters up to 150 words on topics of general interest. Letters must include full name, home address, day and evening phone numbers, and may be edited for length, grammar and accuracy.

To reach the Denver Post editorial page by phone: 303-954-1331

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